


Dreams of Silver

by Syksy



Category: Watership Down - Richard Adams
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-19
Updated: 2015-12-19
Packaged: 2018-05-07 18:07:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5465939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Syksy/pseuds/Syksy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His dreams were never his own. They belonged to the warren, they belonged outside his head. Sometimes he thought that they actually happened outside it, that his head fell open during the night and dreams poured out and played all along the burrows and runs. He could hear their echoes when he woke, just fading around the corner.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dreams of Silver

**Author's Note:**

  * For [astrokath](https://archiveofourown.org/users/astrokath/gifts).



> Thank you to radialarch for betaing, you were awesome!

His dreams were never his own. They belonged to the warren, they belonged outside his head. Sometimes he thought that they actually happened outside it, that his head fell open during the night and dreams poured out and played all along the burrows and runs. He could hear their echoes when he woke, just fading around the corner.

Silverweed had recited his first poem just a day after his mother had let his litter outside for the first time. That outing had also been when he realized he wasn’t exactly like the others. His brothers and sisters were bouncing around with careless abandon, paying no heed to their mother’s gentle admonitions. One of them ran headlong into a shallow trench and rolled over a couple of times before coming up laughing. Silverweed didn’t feel like running. He turned his nose up to the wind and tried to make out all the scents it carried.

His reverie was rudely interrupted by Briar, his favourite brother, crashing into his side. “Quit dreaming, you!” he shouted and nudged Silverweed’s head playfully with his own. Annoyed, Silverweed tried to back away, but his brother would have none of it. “Come on, race me to the big oak.” 

For a moment Silverweed considered taking him up on the offer. He could almost see the two of them: running, tumbling over, laughing in the sun. Then he pushed the image away. “I don’t have time now, Briar,” he said, “I have to learn the wind.”

“What does that even mean?” his brother demanded, peeved and confused. Silverweed started to answer, but realized that he didn’t actually know. It had made sense when he said it, as natural a statement as anything, but he could not reach that thought any more. So he just snapped: “Nothing you would understand!” and hopped away from his brother, trying and failing to understand anything himself.

It was the wind, though, that gave him that first poem. He didn't remember the words any more, but the feeling of joy, of being one with everything and nothing, that he never forgot. It was worth the moments of confusion, worth staying apart, almost worth Briar slowly ceasing to ask him to play.

The dreams had grown darker so quickly. Soon they'd been like spiderwebs around him, a suffocating sense of wrongness and dread that never completely went away, even in waking. He had tried to make sense of things and despaired. Until one night, when he woke with a poem in his mouth and knew that it was all right. This was how it was supposed to be. Because the poem was beautiful, more beautiful than anything had ever been. It did not take away the dream, but transformed it, like a cocoon, into something that flew. And he flew with it. For a moment, at least.

After that, he spent his days chasing that feeling. Awake and dreaming both, he longed only to fly. To be more than a rabbit. To be the wind and the rain and the buzzing of bees. To flee the question and the answer tugging at his ear. He didn't want to know, and neither did anyone else.

They all loved him after that. When a poem came upon him in the great burrow, Cowslip hopped over afterwards and praised him. “You have just the right words,” he said, “I felt you were speaking my thoughts right now.” He preened his ears halfheartedly and added: “Especially the part about all rivers leading to lakes. I can’t claim to have understood it, but very poignant, very poignant indeed. “

It was nice to be valued instead of scorned, but it didn’t really matter to him. Nothing much did, except the dreams and the words. He could feel the others sometimes, drawn into it with him. They could not stay, though, any more than he could. And their longing was different from his, in ways he could not define. 

After the strangers had come and gone everyone was tense. No one said anything, of course, but you could feel the strain like a scent in the air. It fed his dreams, made them darker and somehow even more enchanting than before. Almost every morning he woke to his own screams, but that seemed like a small price to pay. 

One of the strangers had called to his heart. Across the great burrow he had heard the singing of that one's soul and sought to touch it, to explain, to connect. The rabbits of his own warren appreciated him, admired him, but that one might have understood. It could have been good, to share the burden. 

The strangers had not wanted to stay, though, and he could not blame them. He’d always known that something was horribly, permanently wrong in his warren. 

He had never learned the stranger's name, but a sense of him haunted Silverweed. He heard a voice, too distant to really make out, whisper horrible truths that no one wanted to know. He saw from the corner of his eye someone fleeing, someone dying, someone living a life he couldn’t even understand. He felt a shadow over him, not without compassion, but stern in its disapproval.

That was not the only change in Silverweed's life. Sometimes he missed Nildro-hain with a surprising intensity. Her kindness, her gentle humour. She was the first one to ever "go" that he had really known. They had talked about normal things, about eating and playing and finding a doe for him when he was a little older, like he was just another rabbit. Like he could have that life. 

“Little brother.” she had called him. “Little brother, come out to taste the grass. It’s particularly good this morning,” she had told him the last time they spoke. It was the day the strangers had come, and he had felt something shifting in the air already, without being told. So he’d said no. “I’ll come tomorrow,” he had promised, but the next morning there had been flayrah and so they hadn’t had the time.

He felt lonely without her. It was a strange sensation, to miss something concrete for a change. At odd moments he’d want to tell her something, or ask a question, and then realize he couldn’t any more. The warren seemed empty all of a sudden, all the other rabbits just audience and shadows. 

Once he asked one of the does to sing him to sleep. He remembered his mother singing to him when he was a kitten, the lilting sound both calming and strange. It made one think of the world outside, while still cozy and warm in the den. He'd relished the contrast even then. 

The doe had looked at him strangely, but he was their favourite poet. So she sat down beside him in his burrow and as he closed his eyes, she started to sing. The contrast was still there, but now it was a screaming discord, pulling at two halves of him that he had never known were there. The dreamer was happy, the dreamer felt content. But something had changed: something had woken in him when he looked into that stranger's eyes. Something that he could not yet name, but knew inescapably to be a part of himself.

So he asked the doe to stop. She looked offended and turned to go without a word. He let her. What did he care for her feelings or her pride? There was a mystery here, one not to admire but to solve, and that was something he had not wanted to do for a long time.

He went up. He looked at the sky, but the moon had already set. No light called down his name and offered answers. He pawed at the ground, experimentally, but he knew that would lead to nothing. The earth was too deep to be reached that way. He started to wash his ears in frustration, and in doing so found his truth.

It was the part of him that was rabbit. The part that wanted nothing more than to eat sweet grass in the gentle light of the sun. The part that did not love danger, but knew it to be a fact of life, like night or cold. The part that his dreams drove away.

He ran through the grass, cold and wet with dew. Frith was just coming onto the sky, huge and glorious. Life was full of wonders and it did not belong to him. 

He would never see the leaves turn red. He would never feel the air grow cold again. He did not think he could bear it, to see everything die. He`d go before it ever came to that. It would be simpler that way. Summer was the time to live. Autumn was when all this ended, he knew that. And he did not want to see the end.

His name had a part of the answer. Maybe his mother had known that when she named him. Silverweed. Bright and strange. He just had to search all the ground around the warren. Find all the paths, all the places no one else had gone to in a while. Just run headlong, through all his world. He had always known it could be waiting around any corner. The shining wire. The end to all his searching.

 

Run deep, run far,  
run away from the day and the night.  
Run down into the ground,  
into earth and dark and dreams.

Run high, run fast,  
run away from both death and life.  
Run up into the sky,  
into wind and air and dreams.

 

 

There was a strange rabbit right in front of him, close enough for their whiskers to touch. "You do realize," the stranger said, not unkindly, "that this is no way for a rabbit to stop running?" His ears were still and Silverweed could see no sign of an expression. He thought to himself that this should have been frightening, but he could find no fear in himself. It seemed that he had gone beyond that already. So he just stared at the Black Rabbit of Inlé, matching blankness with blankness. 

There was no time now, afterwards. But the silence seemed to go on for very long while. Finally the Black Rabbit spoke again. “I shall not take you with me,” he said. 

Silverweed nodded slowly. He had suspected it might go like this. That he would be the outsider again, like he had always been, deep down where it mattered. But his companion was not done speaking. 

“There is a place for you elsewhere. There always was. It was a mistake, perhaps, that you were born here and not there. But that was not my choice to make, or my responsibility. You were a rabbit here, so I took you when you called. I must come when I am called. But I do not want you, and I expect you do not want me. No matter how you might have thought you did.”

Silverweed did not understand any of it. He was a rabbit. He knew that like he had not known it before. What other place was there to go?

The Black Rabbit answered his thoughts, as Silverweed should have known he would. “Those others, they were always meant to be rabbits. They turned away from that by their own free will. It was otherwise for you. You became a rabbit in the end. That was not something that was meant to happen. You might say that I am here to right a wrong, but who can be the judge of such things?”

While The Black Rabbit spoke the air seemed to grow lighter, though it had not been heavy before. There was new light, though it had not been dark at all. And the most tantalizing scent filled Silverweeds nose, much like flayrah, but sweeter still. 

“I see you have noticed”, The Black Rabbit said. “Go and follow that. Run like you ran when you called out to me. But do not look for me at the end, for someone else rules there.” It seemed that he might have been pleased, but it was hard to tell with his strangeness and the distracting fragrance pulling at Silverweed with a growing urgency. So he did as he was told, and leapt to a run more effortless than thought.


End file.
